“GH arguing with a Gemara…..I’m not surprised”
Neither am I when there is no context for a proclamation that a solar eclipse, which is a known geophysical phenomena, somehow portends bad outcomes for some demographic. Is there the same bleak outlook for a lunar eclipse, a meteor shower etc? It was sometime in the 1540s that Nicolaus Copernicus first explained what was happening in a solar eclipese as part of a radical theory of the Universe, in which the Earth, along with the other planets, rotated around the Sun. His theory took more than another century to become widely accepted. My recollection is the the gemorah you cited was written just a bit earlier,